welcome and enjoy!

Hi and welcome to my blog about comics from other people’s childhood! It is dedicated primarily to British humour comics of the 60s and 70s. The reason they are not from my childhood is simply because I didn’t live in the UK back then (nor do I live there now). I knew next to nothing about them until fairly recently but since then I’ve developed a strong liking for the medium and amassed a large collection, including a number of complete or near complete sets. My intention is to use this blog as a channel for sharing my humble knowledge about different titles, favourite characters and creators as I slowly research my collection.

QUICK TIP: this blog is a sequence of posts covering one particular comic at a time. The sequence follows a certain logic, so for maximum results it is recommended that the blog is read from the oldest post up.

Copyright of all images and quotations used here is with their respective owners. Any such copyrighted material is used exclusively for educational purposes and will be removed at first notice. All other text copyright Irmantas P.

Saturday, November 30, 2013

Regular
readers might remember the little series of self-portraits of those tireless but
often anonymous and uncredited toilers of UK comics – the artists, that I did a year ago. You
can view all the old posts HERE. I’ve found a few more cute examples in the
course of 2013 and will show them in the next few posts before I switch to the
Festive theme.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

1986 SHIVER AND SHAKE Annual retained the page-count of 96 but the
price increased further to £2.50 while the proportion of colour pages dropped
considerably in comparison with the previous Annual. Things were rapidly deteriorating...

Frankly, those SHIVER AND SHAKE annuals of the mid-80s were increasingly
becoming rather boring and formulaic (just as the entire stable of IPC children’s
comics, if you ask me). Sales must have been declining and the publisher must
have realized that enough was enough so the mid-80s was the time when many
once-popular children’s titles had their annuals released for the last time (Christmas of 1984
for Krazy, Cheeky, Knockout and Monster Fun Comic, and Christmas of 1985 for COR!!,
WOW! and Jackpot). SHIVER AND
SHAKE was no exception and this 1986 Annual (published for the Christmas of 1985 of course) happens to be its last.

The last two annuals are very similar, as if they were both put together
in one go.

Mitch contributed both inside covers – one set for spooks (Shivers) and the other one
for elephants (Shakes):

J.Edward Oliver drew this nice little Desert Fox Food Feud
game:

Ghoul Getters Ltd. failed in solving
the problem of a shop keeper whose shop was haunted by a ghastly doorman who
hated customers and slammed doors in their faces. In the end Ghoul Getters
decided there was only one solution which was really going to work:

In the first Frankie Stein story Prof. Cube persuaded Frankie that he should
deliver his letter to Santa in person because one couldn’t trust the post these
days! Cruel Cube hoped that with
luck, his dreaded son will get lost and never come back. Indeed, Frankie did
get lost and fell asleep in a storage yard packed with gnome statues. Next
morning a store manager took him for another statue and placed him in his Santa’s
grotto display but when Frankie gradually thawed out the terrified customers
caused a stampede.

In the second story Prof. Cube wants to claim his bingo prize from the
local paper and nearly misses the deadline thanks to clumsy Frankie who is doing
his best to be helpful. When Dad finally reaches the offices of the newspaper, he
finds out that he got the numbers wrong because he was holding his card upside
down. No prize money for Dad this time, only repair bills from owners of the property
that Frankie destroyed as they rushed to claim the prize.

The Forest Legion put on a show in
front of a TV crew who came to film some natural forest wildlife. The
legionnaires are so eager to become TV stars that they overdo it and the TV
people drive off angry and disappointed. Artwork is by the same illustrator who
was in charge of the strip in the previous Annual.

Just as in the previous Annual, there are two sets of Grimly Feendish, one in b/w and one in full colour, both drawn and signed by Martin
Baxendale.

In the first episode Grimly Feendish has built himself a
Crime-Mobile and is off to clean out every bank in town. This time the cops
stop him by removing a manhole cover from his path.

The scene of the other episode is set at the Police College where students
are watching a video film captured from Grimly Feendish documenting his
various crimes, sneakiness and mastery of disguise. Grimly shows up disguised as
a video repair man and gets his tape back together with the TV and the video
player, only to find out that the laugh’s on him…

In the splash panel of Toby’s Timepiece we see Toby in a
crowd of terrified Londoners who are running for their lives as the great fire
of 1666 rages through the city. A bit later we find out that it all
started on Christmas Eve when Toby realized that he hasn’t bought Mum’s Christmas
present. Toby sets off to catch the shops before they close but accidentally drops
his five-pound note and leaps to catch it before it lands on a bonfire. That’s
all it takes to activate the timepiece and now we know how Toby found himself
in the London of 1666. The watch does not react well to the crowded and violent
environment of the burning city so it quickly transports Toby to the year 1805. The battle of
Trafalgar is about to begin. Toby fires a gun and hits a French ship but the
jolt sets the timepiece off again and he finds himself back in his own town and
time with just enough time to buy his Mom a perfume with an unusual name of FLAME.
The story is easily the worst in the whole series…

___________________________

The review
of the 1986 Annual concludes the series of posts on SHIVER AND SHAKE, a
short-lived but excellent UK comic. Every single strip that appeared in the weekly
has received its own post, as has each SHIVER AND SHAKE Special and Annual. It
took me nearly a year to accomplish the mission and this blog is now the World’s
most comprehensive resource for SHIVER AND SHAKE enthusiasts (all three of them…).
You can revisit the whole sequence by clicking SHIVER AND SHAKE label HERE or in
the column on the right.

SHIVER AND
SHAKE is the second IPC comic title after COR!! that has been covered in every
detail on Kazoop!!If all goes as
planned, 2014 will probably be the year of MONSTER FUN COMIC but a few weeks’ delay
is likely to occur because preparations for a new series will take some time,
besides, I always have lots of other things to do in December and the first
months of the New Year. This does not mean there will be no blogposts – as a matter of fact, I have lots of goodness
lined up for the remaining weeks of 2013 and the beginning of 2014: I will continue with Artist Self
Portraits series that I started a year ago; I will then do a complete retrospective
of Christmas episodes featuring a character known as the ‘friendly monster’ (can
you guess who?…), followed by a series of cover galleries of my favourite period
of one of my favourite UK comics… It will be fun!

___________________________

P.S. If you decide you want to leave a comment, please, do by all means
but be aware I won’t be able to read, publish or answer your comments until the
end of November because when this post goes live I will be soaking up the sun
in Dubai without the possibility and desire to connect to the web :))))